The Colonel’s Corner Safe for Democracy Part 5

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Transcript

0:00 Hey, Miss Bridget. Where'd she go? Let's try to get her up here. Can you hear me, Bridget? Yes, ma'am. Okay. I played the intro. I figured it out. Yay! I'm so proud of myself. This is so cool. And I didn't even have to find a tutorial on it. You beat me because I would have had to do it. Well, first of all, there's...

0:43 According to my daughter, there's not any YouTubes out there that are very good for that at all. But I did figure it out. So I had it uploaded properly yesterday. I just didn't hit the right play button. So now I know. That's awesome. Now, is it playing? I have to pop over there. Is it playing now or is it didn't play? Yeah.

1:11 Yeah, I actually cut out just the first little bit because I hit play and then went go live. So like the first 20 seconds of it was cut off, but whatever. What an awesome video, by the way. Yes, yes. So I'll try doing that like at the beginning and the end. They did say that they were going to do an ending one as well. That may be too much IT for me, but we'll see.

1:40 We'll see. I'm getting way too many buttons here to be able to remember how to push all of them the proper way. So again, I just wanted to get this on record for anybody. I know I'll try to remember to say it at the end as well. I found a really interesting U2 declassified CIA document.

2:07 And just because I've been involved in procurement and how that process actually works and obviously in maintenance, I found the entire thing fascinating. Also, one of the most significant problems they had was the very system that I worked on, which is environmental systems, because at no time in the history of flying had anybody flown.

2:33 that high for that long of a time when this was going on. And so every single system, whether it's the canopy seal, the pressurization, the oxygen, everything had to be reconfigured because none of them were that high up. And so I'm going through that and it's not like

3:01 I mean, obviously it's the CIA, so it's interesting from that perspective, but it's not part of our series. And I'm going to find things like that to do the premium hours that I have to do. So I don't want to make anybody feel like you have to be a premium member of Rumble or else you're going to miss something because I would never do that. I'm doing it because they require us to record five hours of premium content within a 30-day rotating window.

3:31 I will be doing that over there. And obviously you're free to join a premium membership if you want, but don't feel like you have to because I'm hiding something behind a paywall. I'm definitely not doing that. But I will try to find interesting stuff, just not immediately Gladio per se. So having got that out of the way. All right, let's dig in.

3:59 We are on the Secret Warriors chapter in Safe for Democracy. American capabilities for covert operations came too late for some. In the Baltic states, where nationalists waged a tragic struggle against the re-imposition of Soviet control, the issue had largely been decided before Wisner's OPC got into the act. Western cooperation proved too little too late.

4:31 Nonetheless, an attempt would be made. Wisner's move into paramilitary action was preceded by the British Secret Intelligence Service, SIS, whose controller, North, became the first to make contact and give the Baltics hope and support. It was false hope and false support, because as we found out later, they weren't going to do anything. At the end of the war, there had been a moment.

5:02 when news of the atomic bomb reached Lithuania. In Baltic cities, one heard speculation that the Americans would hand Stalin an ultimatum and force Soviet withdrawal. To the enthralled partisans, it seemed freedom must lie around the next diplomatic bend. But Truman made no atomic threat. There was no rollback. Reality, methodically and

5:32 pitiously destroyed whatever hope remained among the citizens. Stalin's garrison in Lithuania had strong forces, but the brunt of the struggle was borne by the Soviet secret police. The Russians annexed the German port of Konigsberg, which became Kalingsgrad and added

6:03 Memel to Lithuania, renaming it Klapida. Soviet control measures confronted a people in turmoil. More than 150,000 were sent to the gulags. Production norms for Lithuanian farmers and agricultural collectives made paupers of many of the rest. The Soviets countered the partisans with many measures, including amnesty.

6:33 attacks, false flags, in which entire British security units pretended to be partisan vans. The largest recorded Lithuanian attack on a Russian post occurred in February 1948, but their strength in numbers eventually declined, and by 1950, the partisans had no more than 5,000 fighters. Collectivization robbed the partisans of their food sources.

7:02 While swelling the ranks of Lithuanian communists, it indicated that many people had decided to cast their lot with the Russians. Lithuanians had contacts among some of these people. Some of them were in touch with the Western intelligence, particularly the British. Lithuanians had a regular courier service, mostly by land across Poland and East Germany.

7:31 When in 1947, the Swedish police set out to investigate a ring of rum rudders, they wound up instead with a gun smuggling operation involving deserters from the Soviet army. That August, the Soviet newspaper Pravda accused the Estonian government in exile in Sweden of being a front for American espionage, which is not probably all that far off because

8:01 Keep in mind, was it Casey or Colby was up there setting up the stay-behind units. So it's completely plausible. Moscow ought to have suspected the British. Sure. Anybody but us. As early as 1943, the Secret Intelligence Service had sent an officer to Stockholm to recruit Baltics. But we have our own guys there too.

8:32 As with the displaced persons after the war, they found a ready pool of enlistees. Infiltration of SIS teams began in 1945. The experience was similar in all of the Baltic nations. When the British gathered most Baltic refugees in small numbers at the camps, among others of the same nationality.

9:02 any of them back to the Russians. The British controller Northern Area, Harry Lambton Carr, masterminded this operation. Partisans who at first relied on leftover German and captured Russian weapons began to get help from British intelligence. The key Lithuanian resistant fighters, Stasys Zymantas and Walter Zelenskas.

9:30 were promised aid and helped organize opposition. The Soviets tumbled to the game toward the end of 1945 when they captured an SIS agent team, four Latvians who had landed on the coast. Russian security specialists broke one of the Latvian prisoners and induced the radio operator to cooperate. They then initiated a deception effort.

10:03 They were radioing false reports of progress, asking for help and new teams. Each of them intercepted. Eventually, one of them returned to the West as an agent under Russian control, masquerading as a partisan fighter, able to supply the Soviets with data on the Baltic efforts and who was receiving training.

10:30 what safe houses they were using, what bases they were using, and what their covert supply network was. British intelligence had its own methods for recruiting and training agents for the secret war. It was not only the Russians who practiced false flag operations. Making contact with former Baltic immigrants, SIS officers usually pretended to be Swedish.

11:01 The pretense would be maintained throughout training, the only exception being a few carefully selected recruits sent to Germany or Britain for specialized instruction. Carr and other SIS chiefs reasoned that spies whom the Russian inserted among the Baltic immigrants would hold back from signing on with the Swedes in hopes of contacting SIS. Since the British occupation zone in Germany included the Baltic coast,

11:31 From an early day, Carr tried infiltrating agents by sea. This was preferable to airdrops. London had a perfect force for sea infiltration. This was the Baltic fishery patrols maintained by the Royal Navy beginning in 1949. Designed to protect local fishermen from interference by Soviet naval vehicles, they used these patrols.

12:03 And the British permitted these unarmed ships to wear Royal Navy ensign. The SIS then enlisted a former German naval officer, Hans Helmut Kloss, who had led a torpedo boat flotilla in the Baltics. In other words, he was a Nazi. To skipper their infiltration boats, Kloss in turn recruited former comrades for his...

12:34 The controller, Northern Area, ran the missions. Harry Carr needed eight months of negotiations with the Royal Navy and the British Foreign Office to secure all necessary permissions. A real problem was the tight British budget for covert operations. That was supposed to, they gave them basically 500,000 pounds. Not that tight.

13:09 Here's where the CIA could be helpful. You know, our money. In particular, Frank Wisner. He had money to burn because of the Marshall Plan. Not only was Wisner liberally funded by three different agencies and the Marshall Plan, he had other means of getting money. The Americans were not ignorant of conditions in the Baltics.

13:42 President Truman himself, in a dramatic gesture near the close of 1946, congratulated a group of Estonian refugees who crossed the Atlantic in a wooden sailing vessel and ordered the immigration services to ignore their lack of visas. Senator Millard Tidings of Maryland worked actively to publicize conditions in the Baltic states.

14:10 The dislocation camps signed a petition appealing for the freedom of their nation and sent it to Truman. Partisans activity peaked that same year before his death in 48. Dr. Alfred Bomanis, former Lafian minister to the United States, wrote a half dozen works on urgent needs for his country. Another one, Joseph Domantis.

14:40 went to Britain and to America, where he wrote of partisans' actions behind the Iron Curtain. The Lithuanian American Council, a permanent immigrant group in the U.S., in January of 1947, made a public appeal for independence for the Allied Council of Foreign Ministers. The Lithuanians tried to meet with President Truman, but he was unavailable. The report observed that secret operations

15:10 particularly through support of resistance groups, provide one of the most important sources of secret intelligence. That was from a study group in 1948. That August, Army staff officers advocated forming small planning groups to fashion a war plan, especially designed to cause the people of Soviet Union to overthrow their government. But the Army staff initiative went nowhere.

15:37 Instead, the OPC materialized under Frank Wisner. The CIA joined the British intelligence in the Baltic partisan struggle using Wisner's Office of Policy Coordination. Wisner, in turn, relied on Franklin Lindsay, his Eastern European division chief, recruited out of the Marshall Plan office in Paris, which means he's the guy that was helping fund Operation Gladio.

16:07 Lindsay was another OSS veteran and one of the real paramilitary, well-experienced agents. During the war, he had worked in what was then Yugoslavia, arranging secret arms shipments. It was Lindsay, together with a former State Department official, Charles Thayer, who had needled George Kennan with proposals for political warfare organizations.

16:38 So Lindsay can fairly be said to have contributed to the origins of Frank Wisner's unit. Enthralled by the Marshall Plan as an economic bootstrap for downtrodden Europe, as a Harvard grad student, Lindsay had watched Marshall's speech pointing up the necessity for this program. Lindsay had gone to work with congressional foreign aid committees and then signed on as a plan manager.

17:08 OSS, let me be here to set up the Marshall Plan, then I'm going to go implement it and ensure that Dulles' stay-behind units are fully funded. Not shocked. Oh, and by the way, he works on the Congressional Foreign Aid Committee to make sure they pass the Marshall Plan. This same stuff happens today. Lindsay and Wisner place great trust in the Galen organization.

17:42 Nazi Reinhard Galen. James Critchfield insists that the organization never conducted operations, which is a bold-faced lie. But in fact, Galen's role was vital. The CIA and the SIS and the German effort continued at least until the 1950s. It continues today, and you have to look no farther than Ukraine.

18:09 Operations were mounted from the western zone of Germany, as was preliminary agent training, though certain specialties such as parachute jumping were taught in England and the United States. And in the camps among the Baltic immigrants in Germany, Galen's agents roamed on behalf of Wisner. The Galen organization talent scouts told the Americans whom to hire.

18:39 So the Nazis are picking out their own people. The Germans had fewer language difficulties with the Baltic nations. So they also did much of the basic training and housekeeping at the bases. They have Nazis training these people. And these are going to be inserted as stay behind units. Gordon Stewart, the German station chief, worried about the first mission when it began.

19:09 October 3, 1949. A team was parachuted into Lithuania by Czech air crew working for OPC, Frank Wisner. Communications remained poor. The agent's messages garbled. The Baltics warned that the operation had been penetrated by the enemy, but the British

19:32 resisted that view. In particular, one of the agents had come twice out of Russia and ultimately denied area with no difficulty. Harry Carr interpreted the suspicions as expressions of politics. At the CIA, Harry Rozeski, chief of the Soviet bloc division, sided with Stewart. Arguments ensued. November 1950, Carr sailed to the U.S. aboard an ocean liner, Queen Mary.

20:02 brimming with proposals to increase the ops tempo of clandestine missions and Operation Jungle as a SIS named Enterprise. So the British doing it had labeled it operationally as Operation Jungle. The CIA agreed and fairly large pool of potential recruits existed.

20:34 Latvians, and Lithuanians. The CIA also did some recruiting among other immigrant population living in the United States. They would be working for Lindsay at $125 a week for three months of training, $100 per day in the denied area, and a bonus of $1,000 if their mission was judged successful, meaning they came back alive.

21:04 One early recruit to the CIA effort was Jonas Lucas, who parachuted back into Lithuania, but soon died at the side of the Forrest Brotherhood. That's the name of the indigenous fighters there. The SIS sent a team in the spring of 1950. They succumbed to Soviet security troops masquerading as partisans.

21:30 Between 49 and 51, the CIA reportedly parachuted several more agents, but the results were poor. Accounts asserted that almost half of the operatives survived, but known cases mostly encountered trouble of one sort or another. A team of four dropped into Lithuania by Wisner in late April 51, for example, were swept up almost immediately by Russian security.

21:57 They had been housed in Stockholm and their mission left from Munich. The Scandinavian branch of Wisner's unit ran the Stockholm end. Branch Chief Lou Shearer insisted that no leaks had occurred on his watch had they been betrayed in Germany. The CIA's concern became manifest about that time. The agency had sent a delegation of seven officers to London.

22:29 where they met with Harry Carr and other senior SIS officers concerned about these operations. Harry Rositsky led the group for the CIA, and one of the more suspicious Baltic officers accompanied the OPC team. Officers like Lindsay and Jerry Miller, the division chief for Western Europe, were where the bases were located, and also Lou Shearer.

22:59 in whose jurisdiction much of the recruiting and support work was done, were under a cloud because of operational failures. Wisner's plans for seaborne landings in the works, doubts had to be cleared up. Rositsky also raised questions regarding possible Russian penetration of Ukrainian resistance groups, as well as British favoritism towards a group the CIA regarded as not good.

23:32 Using precaution, Gerhard Meyer, who was a branch chief for the Baltic under Rosesky, came away convinced, I feel I've spent three days chewing cotton when he was done with the meetings. One of the earliest CIA landings along the coast of Latvia was September 30th, 1951. On that occasion, Russians sighted the E-boat in territorial water. Two destroyers gave chase.

24:03 but Hans Klose maneuvered and his unarmed, unloaded E-boat outran the pursuers. The agent landed during this escapade, later defected to the Russians as well. Major Lusepchik, the Soviet security mastermind, scored his greatest coup at this time when Harry Carr sent orders for agents Berkus and Galdens to return and bring along one of the partisan leaders.

24:34 The Soviets fooled Berkus, convinced Galdens to remain in Lithuania where they executed him, and inserted their own agent, Avritis Galitis, as the purported Forest Brotherhood chief. Galitis went completely unsuspected, regaling British case officers with phony exploits. Sandy McKiblin, a senior SIS officer involved, had been working with the Bolts for more than seven years.

25:03 did not detect anything. The partisan war sputtered to its futile end, just as the CIA and SIS operation had reached its stride. The last battle in Lahtia was recorded in February 1950. By that time, the partisans in Estonia had been worn down to isolated bands. They had been decimated. Although the Voice of America began broadcasting in Lithuania in 1952,

25:32 When all of the necessary people that you would want to reach were already dead, its appealing visions of democracy were at odds with the facts evident to the remaining partisans that British and American agents were intent on intelligence missions and not helping them. Estonian appeals for arms brought just a few crates of pistols and submachine guns from the Galen organization.

26:02 In Lithuania, the National Partisan Army decided to disband in 1952. A few partisans continued to fight. There were reports of captures as late as 1960 and of the deaths in action against the Russians as late as 64. The CIA-SIS operation petered out. Until 1956, agent teams went up to the Baltic by boat. But after 54, the Russians planned...

26:31 planted a spy within the boat service too. While towards the end of 55, the Royal Navy withdrew permission for German ships to use British naval ensigns, removing Hans Klose's cover. Then the new government of West Germany absorbed the Galen organization in order to halt to the missions into Russia. Baltic partisan warfare proved not only futile, but very costly.

26:57 direct civilian casualties in the three states were estimated at 75,000 people. It never had a hope of working. All of their agents that they sent in were killed. And along with it, anybody that had anything to do with them, which amounted to approximately 75,000 people. In Lithuania, the partisans claim 80,000 soldiers were killed.

27:30 but the Soviet disputes that number. American intelligence followed these developments from operational bases in Germany and a monitoring station in Stockholm ran by the Galen organization. Reinhard Galen himself met Frank Wisner only once during a drop-in visit in 1951 to Washington when Galen came here. Beginning in April, Wisner's outfit had direct representation in Stockholm.

28:01 William Colby. There you go. I can always get those two confused, Casey and Colby. I should remember Colby Cheese. Maybe that's how I'll remember it. He had worked in Scandinavia for the OSS and he went back where his primary mission was, setting up stay-behind networks in the region. These groups of agents would be activated supposedly if the Soviets ever came into the country.

28:33 We know they were used for something else. The Baltic partisan failure particularly upset Bill Colby with its implications for his own attempts to create prospective resistance groups. The tight compartmentalization of information within the CIA, especially regarding clandestine operations, precluded Colby from discovering that other secret wars throughout Europe were developing along the same lines. In the end, it was not the Baltic coastal plain, but the rugged Balkans.

29:07 that witnessed the first big CIA paramilitary operation. This plan, in conjunction with the British, aimed to unseat the communist government of Albania, a small state on the eastern Adriatic Sea. It's literally right across the Adriatic from Italy. The geography made this campaign possible. Albania bordered on just two other nations, Greece and Yugoslavia.

29:41 By 1949, both of them hostile to Stalin. So Albania's quote-unquote Iron Curtain was much more vulnerable. There were also bases available on the island of Malta and in Italy, just a short jump away. The CIA intended Albania to be the rollback entry into the Iron Curtain. They also, obviously, it has a huge long coastline.

30:13 So they're thinking that's going to be a strategic advantage. CIA had intelligence that Soviet sailors and advisors were setting up a naval base there. The notion of creating an internal opposition to depose Enver Aksa, wartime resistant leader, who had risen to communist dictator, came from the SIS. I love how this book blames everything on London.

30:42 These were joint operations. A small band of commandos were to be infiltrated to set up local guerrilla groups, which could be coordinated and supported from the outside. The plan was called Operation Valuable and the CIA knew it as BG Fiend, F-I-E-N-D. They were discussing this in late 1948. British officials with Albania had begun

31:14 with incidents two years earlier in which the British warship was fired upon. Later, a pair of destroyers were mined and sunk in the Corfu Channel along the Albanian coast. Although the British Special Operations Executive, the SOE, had armed and advised Enver Hoxa during the war. By 1948, London had decided to overthrow him.

31:41 In February, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin agreed to the plan to detach Albania from the Soviet bloc. The Hoxha government, meanwhile, further encouraged British hostility by refusing to accept an International Court of Justice decision against Albania in the Corfu Channel case. The British wanted American help, especially financial backing, where their special operations piggy bank.

32:10 In March, William Hayter, a senior British intelligence officer, led a delegation of SIS and foreign office officials to Washington to ask for support for Operation Valuable and to present a broad range of alternatives for prosecuting the Cold War. Hillen Cotter was still the CIA director. A month later,

32:39 Frank Wisner took a senior official with him on a trip to London where the Albania plan was finalized. The deal would be sealed with a handshake over a lunch at the Bucks Club. We've talked about that. That's the one where special operations people, intelligence people hang out. Coordinated by a joint committee in Washington, the British representatives for Project Valuable slash Fiend.

33:06 were the SIS liaison man and their Balkan expert at the embassy. Americans included Robert Joyce, representing the State Department. What? The State Department's doing covert operations? I'm shocked. And James McGarger in Frank Wisner's office, whom Frank Lindsey assigned to take the lead. McGarger, a former diplomat. What?

33:38 A former diplomat running a covert operation? Wow. He found the task so rewarding that he moved to the CIA. You know, almost like they change seats. Often. The first OPC field officer assigned would be Robert Lowe, a veteran of the OSS, Cairo, who, get this, was posing as a journalist reporting from the Balkans. What?

34:12 We've got State Department people moving to the CIA and we have OSS turned journalist turned CIA running covert operations. I'm totally shocked. Okay, the British initially provided almost all the manpower. It was the Brits who had the people in Albania. They knew them because they had been aiding them during World War II.

34:43 Lindsay's, whose wartime OSS service was in Yugoslavia, was well known there too. The hopes in Washington were high. Frank Wisner exclaimed to Joyce, quote, a clinical experiment to see whether larger rollback operations would be feasible elsewhere. Unquote. Not only is it not feasible, they just kept trying to do it. On his London trip in April, Wisner suggested the use of Willis Field.

35:17 a U.S. air base in Libya, to mount the campaign. The British countered that Malta, a British possession, was much closer. Malta became the training and boat base. They're launching covert paramilitary from Malta. Malta also was used for training paramilitary. Much of the supplies transited through Willis, though.

35:51 Wisner told an SIS officer, quote, whenever we want to subvert any place, we find the British owns an island within easy reach, unquote. How convenient. And when they want to money launder, they do it on other British isles. It's very, very convenient. British Project Director David Smiley flew out to the island in the spring. His cover was as a deputy chief.

36:20 of staff to a commanding general. In other words, he's wearing a military uniform as a spy. On Malta, Smiley found an old castle, Fort Ben Jemma, suitable for their paramilitary training site. Built during the Napolitanic Wars, there was only a very rough trail to the location, so strange eyes could be detected.

36:49 but it was large enough for the trainees and Smiley's staff. Smiley also procured a boat for agent landings, and SIS rented a villa on Corfu as an observation point. I've been to Corfu a couple times. I wish I knew this history back then. The SIS boss further induced a number of paramilitary experts from wartime days to participate, including Harold Perkins, who ran operations.

37:18 Smiley supervised the training. Feelers were put out in other directions as well. Yugoslavia had halted its aid to Greek guerrillas and broken with Stalin in 1948. They might participate.

37:34 Although the Yugoslavs had approached the U.S. through CIA channels for military aid and depended on this assistance to forestall any intervention by Russia, they decided they did not wish to increase Soviet hostility by acting against Albania. Exhausted by a civil war, Greece also wanted no part of it, though certain Greek generals agreed to assist. For Michael Burke, the adventure began at a hotel.

38:05 the uh a glanquin hotel in new york um it had hosted a thing called the vicious circle a luncheon group that had graced its oak room in pre-war years and included illuminaries like dorothy parker harold ross robert benchley robert sherwood and harpo marks burke got a phone call from someone at the opc and he decided the restaurant would serve as a perfect

38:40 meeting place for spies. So two men come up from Washington to talk with Burke. They had gotten his name from a friend at the OSS, most likely Frank Lindsey. E. Michael Burke had served in the Navy and had been seconded to the OSS. In other words, he was supposedly in the Navy, but he was working for Wild Bill Donovan, which we saw a lot of that of.

39:15 unfortunately, and had been sent to Italy with a team in connection with the surrender of the Axis nation. Toward the end of the war, Burke had gone into Yugoslavia and worked with Lindsay with partisan activities. Another member of the team was John Ringling North of the Circus family, providing Burke with connections to showbiz circles.

39:46 He parlayed them into a post-war job as a technical advisor to Warner Brothers. Oh my gosh, another spy in Hollywood. I'm shocked. He worked personally on a film released in 1948 as a tribute to the OSS called Cloak and Dagger. Isn't that fascinating? By 1949, Burke had established himself in the film industry.

40:18 He's a spy. At the luncheon, he had to suppress his excitement and let his CIA interlopers talk him into coming back to the agency like he ever left. The CIA men described the project in words that could have come straight from Frank Wisner. This was to be an exploratory action, a clinical case. A bunch of people are going to die, but they don't care. Burke told the agency men,

40:54 He'd provide his own cover. Michael Burke moved to Rome and pretended to open a new film company. How convenient. In Rome, Burke began seeing Albanian exiles of different political persuasions with U.S. dollars to induce them to bury their differences. For their part, the SIS called upon Julian Amory and Neil McLean, who had worked for the SOE in the Albanian

41:25 area during World War II. They wanted to sound out their old contacts in Rome, Athens, and Cairo. The exiles, Burke recalled, were more a rallying point than a valid basis for political revolution. Nonetheless, they wanted them interviewed. The politics of Project Fiend was Byzantine. The most accessible Albanian leaders was Bali Kambekdar.

41:54 or National Front, centered in Rome and Athens. They had collaborated with the Germans and Italians in the war. Oh, great, more Nazis. One leader had been the interior minister under the Germans, directly implicated in the February 1944 massacre, bloodletting Nazis. Another had been the justice minister for the Italian occupation government.

42:25 At meetings in Rome in June and July of 49, Birkin Amory nonetheless brought Bali into the operation. You know, because we love our Nazis. The Western spies flew to Cairo and called on exiled King Zog, originally a tribal figure in central Albania.

42:49 Zog had seized power in 1924 coup and several years later made himself a king. Zog now had his own political movement led by Firtat Abbas. When Zog learned the West had already approached Bali, which opposed the monarchy, he was furious and told them to leave. Julian Amory saved the day arguing that the time was not right.

43:19 to re-establish the kingdom. King Zog needed allies if he wished to return. He was like Talleyrand, said Wisner's representative Robert Lowe. I've never seen such diplomacy in my life. Zog finally relented. In Paris in August, Albanian exiled leaders had a press conference announcing formation of the Albanian National Committee. This group then secretly toured

43:50 where the CIA psychological warfare chief, Joe Bryan, helped the Albanians prepare press releases. The Albanians visited the U.S. more openly, sponsored by Frank Wisner's funded Committee for a Free Europe. Acquiring American entry visas proved especially problematic because they were all Nazis.

44:20 Many of the same people had previously been denied entry, but the CIA, like they always do, stepped right in and made it all happen. Bob Joyce reported to the State Department, quote, my friends state they would prefer not to approach the visa division directly in this case because they're Nazis. Eventually, the Albanians got their documents. Of course, they survived.

44:53 misadventures with U.S. immigrations in Canada and finally arrived in the United States. They appeared in New York, Washington on September 19th, 1949. They were received by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Llewellyn Thompson. Two of the Albanians opened an office for National Committee in New York. There on October 3rd, senior Bali politician, the 70-year-old Mikhat Frashiri,

45:22 died suddenly of a heart attack at a hotel. Robert Lowe, called in by the police to identify the dead Albanian, had to explain his connections. Who's this guy? By coincidence, the same night the British boat Stormy Seas took two parties totaling 20 partisans across the Adriatic from Corfu to land in Albania. They were called Pixies.

45:53 as SIS had called the Albanians during training on Malta. This first foray met with total disaster. Four of the paramilitary men were killed, the other escaped into Greece. Albanian government security forces had evidently known the exact time and location where they were coming, almost like they were spying on them. One big problem with Operation Valuable, as it later turned out, was...

46:24 that the SIS had Kim Philby and he was telling the Soviets everything that was going on. The immediate problem for the secret warriors was to replace Fersheri as head of the Albanian political organization. It's really not a political organization. It's fake. The whole thing is made up by the CIA. So they could appear legitimate in invading a foreign country. At Frank Wisner's office, Carmel,

46:57 Offie pushed strongly for the nationalist Hassan Dosti, who had collaborated with the Italian fascists during the war. So they're fascists, not Nazis. Dosti proved to lack the political support to exercise this role. Offie himself soon left the CIA after he was found out to be a homosexual. American and British leaders discussed.

47:29 Project Fiend at the highest levels. Ernest Bevin visited Washington in September 1949. A CIA report concluded that a purely internal Albanian uprising at this time is not indicated, and if undertaken, it would have little chance of success. Do you think that's going to stop them? No. Although presumably the CIA analysts were

48:00 unaware that they were actually going ahead with it. They're just giving them intel saying it's dumb and the leadership is going, we don't care. The CIA analyst noted nine weaknesses of the Hoxha government while highlighting greatly strengthened Soviet control measures.

48:30 That continued the improvement of the 65,000-man army and the 15,000-strong security forces. There's literally no way without a full-scale ground invasion they're overthrowing the government. An Albanian campaign fit squarely in the U.S. policy President Truman approved in 1948 to include placing maximum strain on the Soviet so it's death by a thousand cuts.

48:59 The goals were given concrete expression in a basic policy paper on Eastern Europe on which the Secretary of State, Dean Atkinson, relied when speaking with Bevin. The policy provided for an ideological offensive on all fronts that should be maintained not only on the overt but on the covert. We should increase the support and refuge we may be able to offer to leaders and groups.

49:28 In these countries. In his conversation, Bevan asked whether the U.S. basically agreed with the overthrow of the hopes of government. Atkinson assured him they did. The British foreign secretary also said, are there any kings around that could be put in? You know, because I say that solves all the problems. Just put a dictator in. Call him a king. We're good. The picture seems less prized.

50:03 after the failed October landings. A December 1949 CIA report worried that the loyalty to King Zog might eclipse the nationalist factions. So it's not enough to overthrow the government. You have to control the new government. It can't just be for getting rid of the Soviet Union. You have to pick who you're going to.

50:29 put in charge if you're ever going to do the operation, because that's what really matters. Control, not freedom. So as a result of the question, the answer was the settlements of differences among the exiled Albanians to provide leadership and coordination is a prerequisite for any effective Albanian resistance against the hopes of government. Not even this turn of affairs, however, would assure the...

50:59 Achievement of any successful resistance without material aid from the outside. This combination of factors necessary for the overthrow of the Hoxa regime is lacking. Political differences ultimately limited recruiting to strict quotas. 40% from the Bali group and 40% from the Zogs group. The rest were going to be from other factions. After a disappointing beginning,

51:29 It continued for years, consuming increasing resources. In 1950, the CIA began mounting its own pixie expeditions, forming a unit in Germany called Company 400. An initiative began by Karmel Afi. The unit started with about 50 Albanians, but quadrupled over time. The CIA set up bases in Greece, seven Poles with wartime experience.

51:58 in Royal Air Force Partisan Support Units, led by Polish Colonel Roman Rukowski, were hired to fly transport aircraft. During the summer, Wisner's group used the planes to drop leaflets and propaganda material created by the CIA's psychological and paramilitary staff under Tracy Barnes, recently hired away from his law firm.

52:29 Crafters of these leaflets included E. Howard Hunt. The first unilateral CIA Pixie insertion occurred by airdrop in late November 1950. Nine Albanians drawn from Company 400. Kim Philby remained in Washington through the summer of 51 and when he became suspicious and was recalled. Although doubts focused upon

52:55 Philby as a result of the defections to Russia of two British diplomats, Guy Burgess and Donald McLean. CIA's chief counterintelligence may have wondered about the Albanian fiasco as well. In the interim, there'd been a dozen infiltrations of almost 50 pixies, virtually all staged by sea and air, had miscarried. In one spectacular failure in July of 51,

53:23 With Philby already under investigation, three groups were parachuted in by Wisner. One was obliterated on landing. One was surrounded in a house and burned alive. While two pixies of the last group of four were killed, the other two were captured. They had a public trial. Only overland infiltration seemed to have even a small amount of success.

53:50 A group in September of 1950 managed to survive for two months inside Albania, but could not raise any resistance. The most successful pixie was Hemat Majani, a CIA favorite called Tiger. He made 15 insertions. He habitually moved over land secretly. On his 16th mission, a parachute drop.

54:19 was his last. The Tiger and his party was ambushed. Majani's last mission had actually been set up by the Hoxha-owned security men with Soviet advice. After capturing a radio and two officers of Zog's bodyguard in the spring of 1952, they forced the captives to use the radio to mislead the CIA with rosy reports of pockets of resistance.

54:51 The same kind of deceptions the Soviets had used in the Baltics. But these guys don't learn any lessons. They had been frustrated by boat landing failures. The Americans carried on and dropped Manjani to his death in May of 1953. The Hoxa government paraded captives for a week-long show trial. Not even the CIA could continue after that. Frank Wisner had simply been wrong when he insisted that to Philby at an early stage.

55:22 We'll get it right next time because he's not the one dying. Widespread disillusionment followed the Albanian experience. Not least among them were the former pixies. Several of them complained, we were used as an experiment. We were a small part of a big game, pawns that could be sacrificed. Yes, that's exactly what you were. Michael Burke, the OPC station chief in Rome.

55:50 until 51, voiced a general opinion when he observed, quote, in the end, it was not possible to do without overt air and military support from England and the U.S. or somewhere. You couldn't do it just with the locals, unquote. And so they decided not to in the future. British officer David Smiley moved on to an elite military SAS job.

56:19 and then became a soldier of fortune, doing the same shit, just getting paid more for it. The CIA E. Howard Hunt welcomed orders for transfer to the Western Hemisphere Division. Michael Burke, promoted from contract to regular CIA officer, went to Germany, where he ran agent drops directly into the Soviet Union, no doubt working with Galen's stay-behind units.

56:47 It fell to the Southeast Europe Division Chief John Richardson to liquidate Project Fiend, a wartime veteran of the Counterintelligence Corps of the U.S. Army in Italy. Richardson had been renowned for his skill and tact and ease in which he dealt with locals. Flying to Rome after the show trial disaster, Richardson had the most delicate mission of all.

57:14 Rome station chief still believed in the adventure. Richardson sat him down over drinks and told him that it was over. He said, I don't know what they'll say about it in London. Richardson assured him they already knew. Fighting in Albania may have been fierce, but some of the dirtiest, muddiest covert warfare took place in D.C.

57:43 Long before various cells of spooks were scattered in more than two dozen places around town, the number of ways CIA elements could stumble over one another grew steadily. Wisner's Office of Public Coordination and the espionage mavens of the Office of Special Operations, headed by Brigadier General Robert Show, began having conflicts. There were lots of resentment. Wisner's shop

58:13 had been born rich. The OPC took over the unexpended funds of the CIA until it was replaced and made deals with Treasury to use funds and got money from the Marshall Plan. The OSO got none of that. General Sho's clandestine service people, for the most part, were from the Office of Strategic Services and stayed in intelligence through the lean years after 45, considering themselves

58:43 the only true professionals. Wisner's Wurlitzer had a proportion of former OSS officers, but they were going back to spying after a time that had witnessed huge changes. They were amateur cowboys with missionary zeal. Wisner's people viewed the actual intelligence collectors as washerwomen, gossiping over their laundry. The OSO remained under a strict CIA chain of command while Wisner

59:13 was out in the field playing games. As Admiral Hill and Cotter struggled to establish the CIA, officials at the NSC wrestled with how to control it. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal wanted supervision by the NSC executive secretary. At that time, it was Sidney Sowers who had returned to Washington at President Truman's behest. Sowers wanted no part of that job. He told Forrester,

59:43 that if he wanted to manage intelligence, he would have taken the job of DCI. Hill and Cutter suggested that an outside panel review it and report on the mission. The president approved. Alan Dulles of Solomon and Cromwell agreed to chair the panel, and Forrestal made the appointment, and on Dulles' advice, those of two more members.

1:00:13 William Jackson, and Mattias Correa. All three were lawyers. All three had done intelligence during World War II. All three were part of the Praetorian Guard. The report considered every aspect of U.S. intelligence and had much to do with the emergence of the integrated intelligence community. It implicitly

1:00:43 criticized Hill and Cotter, whose days were numbered, because Alan Dulles wants the job. But beyond its conclusion on CIA leadership, on the community and on intelligence estimates, and on the NSC supervision, the January 49 report had specific implications for the Office of Public Coordination. Of course, both Dulles and Jackson were friends of Wisner's, and the report explicitly advocated for strengthening.

1:01:12 the covert action. Truman's NSC ordered State and Pentagon to collaborate on a paper that would turn the Dulles-Jackson-Corea report into a set of recommendations, completed and adopted by the NSC that July. One of these was that the CIA establish an operations division to include both the OSO and the OPC. Thus, by the summer of 1949, even as Wisner's Wolitzer

1:01:42 took to the field of covert operations in both Albania and the Soviet Union, President Truman envisioned folding the OPC more closely into the CIA, which it basically was. Anyway, we're talking about formality. The initiative required a revision of the Covert Operations Authority 10-2, the one that cost the State Department and the Pentagon direct control over Wisner's Wurlitzer. State took no action at all.

1:02:11 It languished for months while OPC mounted missions in the field. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb. And nobody knew. Truman ordered a full-scale policy review resulting in the now famous paper NSC 68. The U.S. Cold War action should ascend to the new level of intensity, according to 68, including increased political and psychological warfare.

1:02:39 While the cost of NSC-68 was still being calculated in June of 50, North Korea, this is the old version of it, North Korea invaded South Korea. We know the real story. Within days of the attack, Admiral Hilton Cotter requested sea duty and left. The onset of the Korean War triggered a whole new problem for the Office of Public Policy Coordination.

1:03:10 Under 10-2 directive, in wartime, the U.S. military would dictate missions of the secret warriors. But Korea was a limited war, did not engage the bulk of the OPC resources, nor was it the main stage upon which a secret war played. Suddenly, even Frank Wisner had questions, reason to demand changes to his authority. They were intimately involved in Korea in the lead up to it.

1:03:41 Truman already had Hill and Cotter's successor lined up. He was going to ask Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith. The 54-year-old officer had been a wartime chief to Dwight D. Eisenhower. From 46 to 49, Smith had served as a U.S. ambassador to Moscow. From the inside of the beast. He didn't really want the job, according to this book, but he took it.

1:04:16 Walter Bedell Smith had the clout to make things happen and sufficient prestige among the U.S. military to knock down the opposition to working with the CIA. The military intelligence unit had resisted acknowledging the primacy of the director of intelligence. Probably should have stuck with that. General Smith had demanded a deputy who made up for the shortcoming. The man appointed was William Harding Jackson.

1:04:48 co-author of the 49 CIA panel study and Frank Wisner's friend and former law partner. Jackson and Wisner and CIA General Counsel Larry Houston drafted new language for the 10-2 directive, which they took to Bedell Smith. Smith drew through the paper in the trash. Wisner objected that he remained bound to the 10-2 panel. Smith told him to forget it.

1:05:18 As DCI, the general said, he had all the authority necessary to direct the OPC. The arrangements made in 48 had been overtaken by events and were no longer valid. As for Wisner's problem with the wartime military control, General Smith persuaded the National Security Council to suspend the relevant paragraph of 10-2's directive. He promised to draft a new version and gave Wisner the job. The OPC chief consulted the interagency panel.

1:05:47 where it should be noted he had good friends. Bob Joyce represented state, while General John Magruder, once head of the pre-CIA Strategic Services Unit, stood in for the Secretary of Defense. Admiral Leslie Stevens, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had been a military attache to Bedell Smith at the Moscow Embassy. You know, it's just a group of old friends.

1:06:17 We're going to create a paper that says we want to do what we want to do. Not an objective look. Truman, it came back, studied the paper that they wrote, came back, studied with marginal notes in Truman's own hand. One of the few times Harry Truman ever commented on an intelligence matter. Meanwhile, General Magruder told the SecDef.

1:06:51 George Marshall that DCI Smith sought a fair solution to avoid an open battle. Marshall had subordinates at the chairman's meet with Bedell Smith and the 10-2 panel to hammer out an answer. They went along with a formula under which they continued to send orders in wartime, but the contents were to be determined by the director of the CIA. This arrangement would be codified in the national security.

1:07:18 counsel's memo 10-5 and approved by Truman in 51. There remained an internal struggle between the OSO and the OPC. Most of the important CIA stations abroad, these people were in neither one of their chains of command, but they were kept in the picture by both divisions. So they're having lots of problems. And then they also

1:07:50 had Alan Dulles brought in who was hired to be a consultant. The brains at CIA came up with the idea of bringing better cooperation between Wisner and the OSO office by co-locating them. That didn't work out very well. It didn't work out at all. And you had

1:08:17 I'll just give you some of the names. William Jackson was involved, Lyman Kirkpatrick, Willard Wyman, Colonel Kilburn Johnson, and Allen Dulles. Lyman Kirkpatrick also wanted the DO staff kept to a minimum to avoid managers getting in the way of the operators. We can't really have people who are like independent, not out in the field doing all this nefarious things.

1:08:46 We want just a little bit of them because we're not going to listen to them anyway. So why waste a lot of money on them? And then it goes on to say, at the moment of consolidation, the Office of Public Coordination had 47 field stations and about 6,000 personnel. This is in 1952. Slightly more than half of them were overseas contractees, not agents.

1:09:19 At the time in 1951, would you be surprised to learn that half of Frank Wisner's people were in the Far East Division, like Taiwan, Burma, Vietnam area? What were we doing in the 1950s in that area? Oh, that's right. We were running drugs. Half of his operators was in that area.

1:09:51 As an experiment, the small Latin American branches of both OPC and OSO joined together, branch by branch, becoming the Eastern Hemisphere Division. That would be the first. General Lucian Trescott, CIA chief in Germany, saw Smith in early March and presented him with a scheme for integrating all of them. One objection was that key spies cover would be blown in the integration.

1:10:21 Another that staff would resist that change. So just so you guys know, the people that operated clandestinely, they had kind of like their own segregated area. They had their own segregated lunch cafeteria. Nobody saw their faces.

1:10:43 They had their own entrance, everything. And they're saying that if the analysts sat in the room with the covert operators, then they'd know who they are. You're all in the CIA. You're all doing basically the same work. But they did not want any of their operators' faces shown even to the people they worked with. Finally, Director Smith sent Kirkpatrick off to settle differences among...

1:11:13 warring factions. Richard Helms drafted a new merger plan. One interpretation is that Helms followed direct orders from the CIA director, another that Smith enlisted him to overcome the vestiges of all of the opposition. Helms understood resistance to be futile. Richard Helms would one day sit in the director's chair. His biography has called him the man who kept secrets.

1:11:43 In his memoirs, Helms is completely silent about his role in the integration of the office. Helms commented on the people, quote, I was reminded how much there was to be said for the way some OPC officers achieve so many of their objectives while hammering their service into shape, unquote. They've not achieved any of them yet.

1:12:16 july 1952 that basically said um that i'm trying to find the beginning of the quote there would be a single chain of command with a single set of administrative procedures so the province of the oso and the office of public safety plus paramilitary operations technical support and administration the do's paramilitary staff would have a fresh unit taking

1:12:50 this function away from Wisner. Lyman Kirkpatrick in Thailand to reconcile OSO and OPC station chiefs who had a little war between themselves. Thailand, like where we spent $35 million to own the ports and run drugs out of there. The OSO and OPC are fighting. Suddenly got instructions to explain the DO changes.

1:13:21 and continue the trip, alerting others to the orders. Kirkpatrick would become the chief of operations of the D.O. shop, which meant functioning as a deputy to Wisner. But Kirkpatrick never assumed that post. Before leaving Thailand, he suddenly fell ill. It turned out he had polio. After a lengthy rehab, he turned to the CIA and became the infamous

1:13:52 Richard Helm became the acting chief of operations and was formally appointed in 1953. And we will stop there for today. Malta. Just saying Malta. Satanic Malta. Originally the Malta and Waco. I'm convinced they're connected somehow. Lots of shit happens at Malta.

1:14:29 Lots of stuff. Yeah, we've covered the, you know, obviously the origins of the Knights of Malta is from Malta. And that's where they took the survivors of the USS Liberty. That's where they hauled the ship to when they had other options. But it had to be Malta because they had to isolate them. And the universal passports. And the universal passports.

1:15:00 There's like, you can have a universal passport from Malta that allows you instant access with no check luggage anywhere in the world, which is odd beyond odd. But perfect for spies. Yes. Designed and honed for, I would say. Yeah. SR, go ahead.

1:15:28 Thank you, Colonel, and thank everyone for attending here on Spaces and Rumble. And if you haven't posted the Colonel's new intro today, please do it. Send it wherever you want to send it. Send it to the news outlets. Send it to the newspapers. Send it everywhere. I don't care where you send it. Just do it. And it's pinned to her account now. Yes, it is pinned. Thank you, Bridget, for that.

1:15:58 What I'm looking at, what I'm hearing out of this and seeing what was going on with MI6 and, of course, the CIA or prior to the CIA, OPC and everything else, this sounds to me like the initial beginnings of Five Eyes in trying to get everybody together and operating on one page. Yeah.

1:16:22 Am I missing the point? No, no, that's exactly. And that's why I make the point as often, so often that it's nauseating that anytime someone says it's one intel organization, it's never one intel organization. They work as a hive. You know, the latest talking point is that Israel supplied all of the cartel weapons. No, they did not.

1:16:51 Did they supply weapons that ended up in the cartel? Absolutely. We've already talked about the Galil weapons in Colombia and throughout Latin America. Well-known fact. But even Grok got it right when he says 80% of the weapons that have been taken away from any cartel in Mexico was manufactured in the United States. So we are not shipping.

1:17:21 U.S. weapons to Israel and them shipping them to the Mexican cartel when they can walk them right across the border. Sorry, that's not happening. So it's just funny that how people get so siloed into saying, oh, it's only this one intelligence organization. And it's laughable, especially the former CIA guys. I love that.

1:17:51 It's every one but them. Go ahead, SR. Thank you, Colonel. If we could switch subjects a second, would you mind? No. One thing I want to mention is the Colonel was on Beer on the Parade, and if you haven't seen it, you should. You really should. There's some solid information in there that got me thinking. Yeah, it was a fun film. I'm sure that was, Colonel.

1:18:22 But I'm looking at what's going on in Mexico right now with cartels. And obviously these are small cells that are doing all kinds of this, that, and the other. I'm not sure they're small. I'm not sure they're small. They have no demands, which I don't quite understand. They can tell Mexico this, that, and the other, but if we're not going to let them come over the border, we're not going to let them come over the border. That demand won't fly.

1:18:54 I'm looking at this from the standpoint of certainly Mexico or the military of Mexico knows exactly where these people are and why they haven't where they were training. And they got that information. You got it all over X. It's like, oh, yeah. Why don't you just go bomb the hell out of that? Well, because most of the military are.

1:19:21 There's a lot of synergy between the military and the cartels. And all of the politicians that survived to enter office are owned by the cartel. So there's not a lot of political will to do anything about the cartel because they had to cut a deal with them to get in office. So until...

1:19:51 There is a big enough dent that they see that they're on the downside. You're not going to find very many of them. It was just like Columbia. You don't find very many of them willing to stand up because they understand it's a death warrant. And I was interested in looking at some of those maps that map where they were. I mean, it's basically just a rebellion.

1:20:22 The supposed Mexican military took out the leader and they're just going, it's like the Phoenix program. They're just going to burn it all down. They don't give a shit. They want to create terror and control the circumstances. And the one way you do that is by doing what they're doing.

1:20:46 You just terrorize everyone and hoping that they're going to go back into their shells and not continue to attack. They've already become significantly under pressure because much of their routes into the United States, which is their big market, has been cut off. And that already put them under pressure.

1:21:12 And so then for us to go in and take out one of the most significant leaders, and I'm not saying we were there, but he's been taken out one way or the other, inflamed an already very destabilized environment there. So they're just going apeshit crazy right now. In a way, this is sort of what I'm getting at and looking at. You just hit the nail on the head concerning the leadership of the political leadership.

1:21:45 In Mexico, it got the tones of a coup, but it's not really a coup. In which case, if the cartels are the ones that are really running the nation, then their own people should be in charge instead of having to buy someone. They can't do. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. You can't do that because then the United States would have to cut them off. You have to have what appears to be a viable political.

1:22:14 system in order to continue to trade with the United States and have the border open to the point where you can get drugs onto cars coming across, trains coming across. If the cartel was to just take over the entire state, the United States would have to declare war on it. Come on, SR. Fair point. It's all a facade. It's kind of like us having Biden in charge.

1:22:44 Does anybody think that Biden was actually in charge? No, it was a facade. Illini, go ahead. Hey, Colonel. Yeah, it's interesting what's happening in Puerto Vallarta right now. You know, obviously, it's kind of made its way around Twitter a whole lot. The video of the priests on the roof of the cathedral there. But what do you think is like what I'm worried about is.

1:23:15 You know, there is this connection between maybe not individual churches, but certainly the Vatican and the drug trafficking networks. There's a big connection, especially with human trafficking. What do you think is happening to, you know, everything that gets said to the priests in confession right now?

1:23:39 Is there a way to kind of, you know, I'm not sure if you're worried about the same thing that I'm worried about, but is there a way to kind of protect people from that? Well, I'm not sure I get your overall point, but you remember back. Do you think that that intelligence is getting passed back to the Vatican and then is the Vatican ultimately passing that to the cartels? That's what I'm worried about. Oh, I don't even think it has to go to the Vatican. Fair point.

1:24:10 because we know that the church has laundered money for the cartels or to drug operations in general. So it is a very interesting piece of the puzzle. We have not seen in Mexico the same terror.

1:24:43 that had, and maybe it's because there isn't any good ones. If you guys remember when we did the studies in Latin America, how any priest that stood up for the people and supported the non-narco people were all assassinated. And so that leads me to believe if patterns are true,

1:25:12 that you're not going to have any priests that's going to be part of the solution because they would have already been killed. Does that make sense? Okay. Okay. Interesting. Because that's what history has shown, right? We had the, what is the name of that? Those women, I was just reading it last night.

1:25:40 I'm reading the court case of where they testified in Congress. Oh, shoot, it might be right here. Mary Knowles or whatever those ladies were that were part of the – they weren't Catholic, but they were part of one of those things that are like the Catholic Church. Well, there was the liberation theology liberals in Latin America.

1:26:02 from the 60s through the 80s the catholic church kind of declared anathema yeah no no not that and they all got disappeared no no um oh shoot it was um there was like six of them that were assassinated um oh shoot i want to say it was in guatemala it may have been el salvador um but their headquarters or their the church that they were affiliated with if i'm not mistaken was out of like tennessee

1:26:33 But anybody, that's my pattern recognition, is that any of the church officials in any of these countries that we studied that were undergoing a coup actually stood up for the people. They were assassinated. And follow-up question on the Puerto Vallarta thing.

1:27:05 It looks to me like the cartels basically shutting down traffic and attacking businesses and everything. It doesn't seem like a sign of strength to me. It does not. It seems like they're pissing off the local population. They're trying to get the local population upset at the Mexican federal government to get them to stop cooperating with the United States.

1:27:36 But it seems like Scheinbaum, on the one hand, is saying the Mexican government's not getting involved with this all that much. But she's not necessarily backing down out of cooperation with the United States either. And it seems like this could potentially backfire on the cartels politically. Is that a fair assessment? It is. I'm not so sure how much they care about politics, though.

1:28:07 So if you look at it from the different perspectives that the people in the villages have lived under the control of these cartels for their best hope is to stay out of their way, right? They live in fear.

1:28:30 of them, they may live a somewhat normal life, but they also know that they live in a box and they can't go outside that box. And if one of them grows up and goes off to university and comes back and thinks that they're going to move the box an inch to the left or an inch to the right or an inch to the north,

1:28:58 run for office in their local community and seek more safety or in any way infringe upon the narcotic trafficking around them, they'll be assassinated. So I think they understand that as long as they stay in their little box, they're fine.

1:29:23 That is basically anybody that then gets promoted out of that box to maybe the regional area has been in that box for so long. When they get to the region area, they're still going to be in a box. It's just a bigger box. And then that is true when they get to the federal level. There are certain parameters that you know if you go beyond those parameters.

1:29:52 They will take you out. And I want people to understand we've lived like that here. I mean, if you're a reporter and you go outside of your box, there's a good chance that if you find something that you're not supposed to find, that they will assassinate you. This is not an isolated thing. It is true in any big city that you...

1:30:23 give up the identity of somebody that through just a weird set of circumstances, you're like, oh my God, that guy's a drug dealer. They'll come after your family. The political system is to a degree the same way as well, because you have to be in this. It's certainly true in my hometown. There is a clique of people that determine who's going to be the representative here.

1:30:52 You're not going to be the representative here either at the state or federal level if you're not in that clique. It just isn't going to happen. And I don't know what they have to do to be in that clique, but they sure as hell don't represent me. But there's no way of getting in it if you have a MAGA type message here even in Central Florida. You're not getting in. So I don't want it to make it sound like they're living.

1:31:23 Ours is just not as violent. It is violent. It's just not as violent. But for the most part, any place that has a pervasive deep state presence, they're all going to experience the same thing. There's just different methods that they use. Obviously, if they got too violent here,

1:31:50 then somebody's going to have to do something about it because we're still pretending that we have a democracy. Those guys don't pretend down there. I don't know who was next. Ron, go ahead, and then we'll go to Stellar. I was hoping I could go first. I'm sorry. It's only because I'm going to end up running out of reception. I'm sorry, Ron. I'm sorry.

1:32:21 Okay, so I guess I'm looking at it as we're witnessing a gang war going on. And the gang who is supporting Shine Bomb is not putting things down as far as, you know, the stuff, you know, kind of like the Bloods and the Crips.

1:32:40 And it seems like the gangs, you know, the narco government has been controlled because it seems like with different politicians, it's the different gangs. So she is and was, like, helped with, like, the gang that she was with is a different gang. And then, you know, and she did have, you know, the U.S. help. But the biggest, their biggest competitor, if you want to say, Hinchpin.

1:33:09 was the man that was taken out does that make sense yeah so um who she's back or who's backing her is a different cartel and so it was in some respects she got the u.s to get rid of the biggest competition but now her her cartel has to go down does that make any sense it's yeah it's just like but hold on do you have any evidence that the u.s was in there helping

1:33:40 From my understanding, there is something. They went in last week or a couple of days ago. Just two Navy SEAL people went in, from my understanding, to do. But we don't have any evidence of that. No, it's on here. I'll pull it up. I'll pull over. Hold on. Yeah, I've not seen any actual evidence. I've heard people say that. I just haven't seen it.

1:34:13 Okay, give me about five minutes while Ron's talking. I'm going to be quiet now, and I'll go find it, but give me about five minutes. Sure. Oh, I didn't want to. I just wanted to say, ask Michael Hastings about reporters being killed. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, nobody will ever make me believe he was doing 120 on a desolate street in Los Angeles or Beverly Hills. I know that area. That's just not possible. Right. Right.

1:34:44 It's just a matter of the method they're going to use to do it. Well, and the interesting thing there is about the remote taking over a vehicle, which is how they do airplanes too. That's what I said. It's just a matter of the method, whether it's going to be two gunshots to the back of your head and call it a suicide or electrical thing and hang yourself while also simultaneously shooting yourself. It's just a matter of the method. If it's your time to go, you're going to go.

1:35:15 Or they chop you up and put you in a 50 gallon barrel and float you out in the water. They have all kinds of really awful ways of doing away with people that I've come across. Or, nevermind, you get the point. And it is interesting what Stellar was talking about because we have seen that happen time and time again.

1:35:44 And Scheinbaum thinks that she is going to be able to eliminate the competition to the drug operation or narco operation that's supporting her. And it's going to be able to take over that territory. She's sadly mistaken because that's not going to happen. It may have been expedient to get rid of the competition.

1:36:13 um initially but president trump's not going to be satisfied until they're all gone and that means they're all going so it's just a matter of what order they're going to take them out in carl can i can i ask can i add something to what you just said it's you know i watched i watched the show that you did with um oh uh the all the colonels and the general

1:36:40 Yeah. Several weeks ago. Tommy's podcast. Yes. Very good. Very good show. And, you know, I thought it was really interesting when I'm drawing a blank on his name, but he's the other colonel from Phoenix. And he said that he had talked to he had talked to Stephen Murray. Stephen, thank you. God, because I know him. He was on the show that we had the kerfuffle. Anyway, the so, yeah.

1:37:11 But when he said that – Kash Patel said, look, we've got Team A, Team B, and Team C, and we've got backups to backups to backups for redundancy. And everything that's happening to me right now is – it's just – it's all – I think it's – I don't want to say that it's scripted, but it's –

1:37:33 It's close to scripted, if that makes sense. Well, I think they have an order of battle. That's what you're looking for. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, they have an order of battle. Yeah, they have an order. This is a war plan. We're going to war with the narco states, the deep states in all of these different countries. And there is a battle order that has already been developed.

1:38:02 As with any battle order, there will be revisions to it. There will be addendums to it. But there is a sequence of events that is generated from the battle order. And they're going down. Stellar, go ahead. Those two are acceptable. I know that they're Mexican. You cut out. Stellar, you cut out.

1:38:34 Okay, I put two things up in the nest, so I don't know if those are legit or not, but that's what I was going by. And then the other thing that I was going to say is don't forget that during Christmas, Mexico released or gave back to the U.S. 55 cartel leaders, and I believe that they did something again back in February, but I'm not going to be able to pull those. Oh, yeah, they've extradited a lot of them. You're right. Yeah, we've been tracking that.

1:39:05 Oh, but see here it's saying they trained them. It didn't say that they went in with them. That's my point. I've not seen anything that, we train a lot of foreign military, especially Mexico. For hell, we train all of the Colombians too, as I illustrated with my visit to the hemispheric school. Yeah, so saying that we've trained someone,

1:39:34 that actually took a shot is not the same thing as saying they went in with them. Does that make sense, Stellar? Yes, ma'am. Sorry about that. That's okay. Yeah, I just want to make sure that we're saying the right, you know, real information. I don't want to be fake news too. Why are you so mad? Go ahead. Okay, I wanted to jump in and actually you just covered it.

1:40:02 I don't think there's any concrete evidence that the U.S. military went into Mexico and killed anybody. And I think if that was the case and there was evidence of it, that would be a very bad optic for the U.S. military at this point. I'm not saying they didn't. I'm just saying there's no evidence of it.

1:40:27 I can neither confirm nor deny anything when it comes to that. And I think it's more important that we do get things straight. Training people is completely different than saying, hey, we had a couple of Navy SEALs go in there and do whatever they do. So I just wanted to make that real quick because I've got to actually go. But wonderful episode.

1:40:51 Thank you. Wonderful episode. Always a pleasure to hear you bringing the light into the darkness. And I appreciate that from you and Bridget and everybody else. Thank you for all of your work and still being on duty for this country. And I really appreciate that. Thank you. SR, go ahead. Thank you, Colonel. Concerning training, I did see a video of some news, Mexican news station.

1:41:22 talked about these people from the cartel being trained in Ukraine. Now, whether or not that's true, I would probably say there's a high probability of it, but I don't know that there's any evidence to that fact. And of course, who would have trained them? The CIA. I mean, there's no other game in town when it comes to that, if I look at this correctly. Is that true, Colonel?

1:41:52 Well, our military trains a lot of these people. That's what the whole school of Americas were. They were training all the bad people. We do a lot of mill-to-mill training.

1:42:07 We do a lot of training of their national police here, much to my chagrin, because I don't think we should be in that business. If some private company wants to go down and train other countries' national police, I think that's fine. That is not something that our military ought to be involved in. But we are, because I saw it with my own eyes just like a couple of months ago. Well, this summer. It's been like six months ago now.

1:42:37 So the military does training, but the CIA prior to now, because we don't have any evidence that that's a current statement to say, but most of the existing entities that are in foreign countries, especially the ones that we're close to, like Mexico,

1:43:07 has had CIA in there doing training. So both of those things can be true. So is that Latin Riviera thing that I put up on top, is that BS? Because it said that they came, they approved it, I believe it's sometime around this 19th of February, and it seems like it was SEAL Team 2, and they approved up to 19 or 20 from what that article says. I just haven't seen if, you know, I just said that they...

1:43:41 I don't know. I don't know if that's a real thing or not. But it just seems like there's a lot of the Latin American press releases that are going off similar to that. So, yeah, to your point, he doesn't have any links here to say that there's any validity to the number 19 that I can verify. But it says Mexican Senate has voted to allow 19 members of the U.S. SEAL Team 2 this April.

1:44:10 And I assume that's like two months from now to train Mexican special forces in the battle against the cartels at the request of the president. So if that's true, I think it's only notable based on what just happened. This is stuff we do all the time.

1:44:41 You know, the mil-to-mil training has gone on for a very long time with Canada, Mexico, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala. All of those countries have been in the United States and or we send training teams to their country to do that militarily.

1:45:14 And again, I'm not saying that some of these operations, because we know, we were just talking about sheep dipping. That's what they do. The special forces do covert operations. If we have Hispanic people in our special forces, they are part of the whole JSOC mission is they...

1:45:43 They dress up as other people just like the CIA does. There could have been JSOC personnel embedded in activities that are, I'm not saying there is. I'm just saying that's not outside the realm of possibilities based on the way things has happened in the past. It's also not outside the realm of possibilities that the CIA is doing that.

1:46:09 and doing it for the right reasons as opposed to why they were doing it all along. Because the CIA has dressed up as just about everything in the world that you can imagine and infiltrated different bad things and did really, really bad things. All of those things are on the table and none of those things are we going to find out about in the near future.

1:46:37 unless they decide just to disclose it. But all of those things are very possible based on what we know to be patterns of how these things operate. And maybe for the first time in CIA's history, they would be doing it for the right reasons to protect Americans from narcotics as opposed to doing it for the wrong reasons to bring narcotics in here.

1:47:04 Well, I just put an article up on top from the Latin times and it shows that it was sometime back in January. So I don't know. Well, no, those can be both true at the same time. So we could have done it in January and we've got another group coming to be trained in April. Both of those things can be true because that would actually make more, that would make sense because they could have them on like a 90 day training rotation.

1:47:37 where we did train a group of them in January and we've got another one scheduled for April. Does that make sense? Because normally when you set up programs like that, they're not one and dones. They're not, you're only going to do it this one time and never do it again. Normally when these arrangements are set up, they're on a reoccurring basis. Like for example, when we've trained foreign pilots, we get a new class of them.

1:48:09 like every six months, they come over and go to our war colleges on an annual basis. And that's a reoccurring thing. You know, every August when the new class starts, we get a whole new group of foreign officers at Maxwell Air Force Base going to either Air Command and Staff or Air War College. The same is true for any of the, we get some of their senior enlisted people going to our enlisted schools.

1:48:38 which are much shorter. They're not a year long. But they're done through a negotiated foreign exchange program where they come over on a reoccurring basis. The same thing in aircraft maintenance. When they're flying our aircraft, we give them a quota and say, you can send 50 people over to be jet mechanics.

1:49:06 And then they just come over however often the course starts. They just send us the new trainees. Thank you. And I don't mean to be such a pain in the butt. No, no, you're not being a pain in the butt. No, this is a fascinating conversation. And I think it's very helpful to put it in context. I'm glad you brought it up.

1:49:40 Rusty Beltway said that the newer cartels are more violent and ruthless. I don't know that I agree with that statement. He's over on YouTube. We've been researching this years now. The violent, it may seem like they're more violent, but I have read very descriptive books.

1:50:09 about the cartels and how they kill people. None of them are not very, very, very violent and ruthless. I don't know that I would agree that they're more violent and ruthless. I mean, you have the guy, was that in the 80s or early 90s where they kidnapped?

1:50:38 that college kid out of Texas when they had walked across the bridge in Brownsville. And he was kidnapped by a satanic cartel and they cut his heart out. They basically disassembled him in a satanic ritual killing. This has been going on for a very long time and it is very, very violent.

1:51:08 They skin people. They skin people alive. They've done all kinds of horrific things. And wasn't it just last year or the year before that they came up with that large burial ground down in Mexico of all the bodies that were dumped by the cartel that was excavated? Yeah. Colonel, if that was the Matamoros murders, I think that was like 89. Yeah.

1:51:38 Yeah, I was thinking it was the late 80s. If it was just one individual, that doesn't sound like it. I think Matamoros was a large number of people. It was. But that one got investigated and exposed by both Mexican authorities as well as the U.S. Yeah, thank you for providing the exact. Yeah, and when they found that, there had been several people.

1:52:07 that had been subjected to that. So yeah, it's just, the whole thing's awful. And we as humanity need to address that and deal with it in an appropriate way, not as we have done in the past, overlook it because they're a part of making illicit,

1:52:37 money for these um horrific assholes um that facilitate this narcotics trafficking ron go ahead i was just i was just going to say a lot of you is you cut out make the killing so brutal um can you hear me now yeah is this any better okay yes a lot of times what a lot of times what the cartel will do is whether you're guilty or not they will kill you in such a brutal fashion that

1:53:11 It doesn't really matter if you did it or not. It's the message that it sends to the people around. It's like, wow, they must have done something really, really bad because look at how bad they were dismembered or mutilated. And essentially what it does is it's basically a terror tactic, which very likely that's what they learned at school. Yeah, yeah. And the terrorization of people is part of their...

1:53:43 tactical toolkit. You don't have to kill viciously a whole bunch of people. The statement of you viciously killing someone has a profound psychological effect. And, you know, that's why they do terrorist attacks, because it's psychologically

1:54:13 affects a large swath of people. And it actually kind of minimizes the effort you have to put into that because the more horrific they are, the more it terrorizes people into compliance. Yeah, great point. All right. So if you're done, I have something I just want to share with you.

1:54:43 This is completely unrelated, but it had to do with the Epstein files. I was watching a video the other day where this guy was going through, and he pulled up an old Washington Times article. I guess this had to do with the Les Wexner deposition. And apparently they hired somebody, this woman who had run the U.S. embassy in Rome.

1:55:09 I looked it up and I can only find one person that was a woman who was, you know, I don't know. Is it chief of mission? Is that what they call it? Well, no, no. I don't know. I don't know. I'm asking. I don't know. I know. I'm trying to answer you. The description of that woman is not chief of mission. There is a, you wouldn't call her a secretary, but she's like the chief admin person.

1:55:39 And that is not the chief of mission. Basically, the chief of mission is a CIA guy or woman. But that's not the description they're giving. I am. This is because the timing that they are using. Hold on just a second. I think I got a phone call. Let me get my screen back up here.

1:56:09 The timeframe that they're using, a friend of mine was actually in the Rome embassy who I'm trying to get ahold of. And he would know, I was up there a lot during that time. And there was a woman that I met there that fits the description. I don't know what her name was. I mean, I only met her a couple of times.

1:56:37 Because I only went in the actual embassy twice during the time he was there. The thing that he did, that he talked about in the video, and he had no fucking clue about what Gladio was. But he said, oh, yeah. He's like, yeah, it's just like, well, it's just that they were. You keep cutting out, Ron. Ron, we can't hear you. Ron, we lost you. I do have a comment on this one. Sorry, you had your hand up first.

1:57:15 Go ahead. I mean, Ron, we were the first, I mean, Team Gladio was the first one to find this. We actually chipped Diligent Denison off to us, and it would have been nice to get the citation for it, but we didn't. But we did, I mean, we basically figured out that one minute before he said that, I mean, that evening that it came out.

1:57:41 We tracked it down. Diligent thinks it's Lindy Boggs. I disagree with that one completely. I do too. Lindy Boggs wound up going back to Louisiana, and she had her home damaged during the storm. That doesn't sound consistent with somebody who's doing security for Les Wexner, either in Columbus or in New York or anywhere else.

1:58:10 One question I have for Colonel is, does she know if the special envoy to the Vatican is going to be housed in the same building as the Rome embassy? The special envoy to the Vatican? Yeah, because we've got two diplomatic missions to Rome, right? The first, obviously, is to, you know, the country of Italy. The second's to the Vatican.

1:58:35 But if I'm not mistaken, and it is something once I get a hold of my friend I can verify, I'm almost certain that our Vatican representatives are actually inside the Vatican walls. They are not co-located with the Rome embassy. Okay. So it's – I mean you might take it differently. There's a little bit of ambiguity to Wexner's reference then because the Vatican is in Rome.

1:59:05 Correct. But it's got a wall around it. It's a very separate entity than where our embassy is. But I will verify that. And the arrangement today may be very different than what it was during this timeframe that they're talking about.

1:59:26 Oftentimes, there's renovations and all kinds of different things going on where some of those arrangements can be for some period of a couple of years or whatever. But my friend's going to know this. Okay. Go ahead. One last point on that house manager, or at least whoever it was that Wexner said was there to keep track of the silverware.

1:59:52 It seems kind of like a – maybe it's some kind of a major domo kind of role that Wexner hired or maybe it's household security. But this – he was asked other questions previously that women were saying that, number one, he shared security.

2:00:13 With Jeffrey Epstein, whether he knew anything about that, his answer was no. What are you talking about? You know, obviously a billionaire is going to be good at, you know, handling these depositions and giving answers if he needs to. But he's saying, no, I didn't know anything about that. And then he's you've got witnesses saying that, you know, victims need to call the house, you know, Wexner's house in order to leave.

2:00:41 So if that person – if that woman who was hired in from the Rome station is in charge of Wexner's security, you kind of have this similar Praetorian Guard-style subversion of Wexner's own administrative state. The same way that Nixon's inside this beautiful White House fishbowl where everything is happening outside around him and kind of affecting his presidency.

2:01:11 You kind of have a similar situation. You at least see Wexner's defense shaping up, which is I hired this woman for the Rome Station. She's affiliated with the CIA. I got Nixoned. Yeah. Yeah. And that's always going to be their initial defense, right? I mean, they all say that.

2:01:37 That was the whole thing with Eisenhower. I didn't know any of this stuff was going on, only to find out later he actually signed the findings. That's always because plausible deniability is built into their modus operandi. They know what they're doing is wrong. And they are going to get enough people around them to shield them that can always take the fall for them. And that's why they're paid very well.

2:02:07 At the end of the day, you take a job like that, anything goes wrong, you're taking the fall. It will not be the principal. It will be you. And they get enough layers between them and the deed and they can blame anybody in that chain of command. But I do hope my friend reaches back out to me because I would love to know.

2:02:36 You should keep that in your pocket, Colonel, and wait for an episode with Redacted to break that one. Because otherwise you're not going to get the citation from everybody else on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that would be very interesting. Ron, go ahead. I keep getting kicked off and back in, so I apologize. I didn't mean to bring this up. I'm on the late freight, clearly. Anyway, just...

2:03:06 Issues on my end out here, I haven't really been able to participate for quite some time. Mom had a stroke, etc. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Yeah, I'm kind of now a caretaker, so my time is really, really restricted. But anyway, I saw that yesterday. I'm like, man, I've got to get on and tell you guys about this today.

2:03:32 Way behind. I don't know. Our circle has gotten big enough that I think we kind of all just feed off of each other as far as the information to be able to parse out what's real and what's not. And I can't tell you guys how amazing this is. There's so much going on right now.

2:04:01 And I'm so grateful that we have done this over the last several years because it allows us to put everything in context that a lot of people don't have so that we don't have to get spun up about all of this other stuff. We see it as just another piece of the pie and can put it in its place because we know how these things operate. And I'm just, I'm tickled that we...

2:04:29 been on this journey together. SR, go ahead. Thank you, Colonel. There's a film that won a Golden Globe Award, One Battle After Another. Courtney would like to know if you've seen it, what's your take on it? I saw where you said, is that the name of it? One Battle After Another? Yes, ma'am. Okay, so you can obviously tell by my not even knowing what the name of that is. As SR said, Courtney, I don't watch movies.

2:05:01 I'm told there's lots of good ones out there. I prefer to read books. And I don't even know what the context of the movie is. Is there like a particular angle to it? Let me look it up real quick. One battle. Has anybody else seen it? I've never even heard of it. Yeah.

2:05:35 Okay, so here it is. It says that it is a 2025 American black comedy action thriller. Yeah, I can guarantee you I've not seen that. Inspired by the 1990 novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon. The film's, let's see, says Anderson had wanted to adapt Vineland.

2:06:04 Let me get the plot, okay. Ghetto Pat Calhoun and Perfidia Beverly Hills are lovers and members of a far-left revolutionary group, the French 75, while breaking out detained immigrants from a detention center. Damn, this sounds like predictive programming already.

2:06:31 perfidia sexually humiliates the commanding officer steven lockjaw who becomes obsessed with her when lockjaw catches perfidia planting a bomb he lets her go after she agrees to his demand to later meet him for sex after perfidia gives birth to a girl named charlene pat tries to persuade her to settle down but she

2:06:59 instead abandons them both to continue her revolutionary activities. She is arrested after murdering a security guard during an armed bank robbery. This sounds like Gladio. Lockjaw arranges for her to avoid prison in exchange for details on key members of the French 75 members. This literally sounds like Gladio.

2:07:23 perfidia enters the witness protection while lockjaw uses the information she provides to hunt down and summarily execute her comrades french 75 member howard somerville gives pat and charlene stolen identities as bob and wilma ferguson um while perfidia uh flees the witness protection program for mexico 16 years later living off

2:07:50 in a sanctuary city in California. My God, Bob has become a paranoid stoner. He is protective of Willa.

2:08:02 now a teenager who resents his substance abuse. And he has led her to believe that Perfidia is a hero. Though his anti-immigration efforts, Lockjaw has become a colonel and a prominent figure in US security agencies. When Lockjaw is invited to become a member of the Christmas Adventurers Club, a white supremacist secret society, he seeks to kill Wilna to hide his past.

2:08:35 which was an interracial relationship. He hires a bounty hunter. Oh my God. Yeah. I think this is predictive programming. That's what this is. Yeah, it's got Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn in it. That'll tell you all you need to know. Yeah, that's predictive programming. And one of the reasons why I don't go watch movies is because I don't need more programming.

2:09:04 I'm trying to leave the matrix that I was in for 30 years. So, yes, that is a predictive programming movie. Have you ever heard the term Carnelian law? I don't know that I have. So apparently Carnelian law is like they tell you what they're going to do and that absolves. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:09:32 I mean, I've never heard it referred to as Carnelian law. That's why I was asking. No. So anyway. Yeah. And that is something that I read in that Gnostic mysticism and all of that other stuff that as long as they tell you, and that was part of the whole Fabian thing and why they didn't hide anything.

2:10:00 They told you exactly what they were going to do. And therefore, if you don't stop them, then you deserve what you get. Yeah. Exactly. It's kind of funny how applicable Revelation 18 is to the age that we're living in right now. It's pretty wild. It's very wild. Okay. So I'm going to run, go eat dinner. You guys take care. I'm probably going to try to do another segment of that. You too.

2:10:33 um document that i found and i also i find way too many of these cia documents um but i did find another one that i find fascinating that we'll have to do a separate show on as well um but anyway um you guys take care sr go ahead i just want to say thank you colonel and on youtube the the reading that you're doing sr 71 got a shout out awesome so that that

2:11:04 That was something. Cool. Just so you know, Colonel, Courtney says it gave her the impression of the weather underground and what was going on. And from your reading, I can see it. Yeah. Yeah. The weather underground was 100% Operation Gladio. 100%. So good observation. We're all so much smarter together having done all of this.

2:11:33 So I love it. We can now see things for what it really is and not what they were trying to do to us. So awesome. All right, guys, have a nice evening and I will see you. So I just wanted to check the calendar. This week is like slam packed full. So there's another Tommy video that we did today with a new guy whose name I'm not gonna remember.

2:12:01 that I will repost. Tomorrow, I have another Tommy podcast. It's in the morning, so I'll probably be able, he posts them relatively quickly after he gets them done. So it'll probably be out around noon. We have our four o'clock and then we have the book club with CanCon and Ash tomorrow at six.

2:12:32 On Wednesday afternoon at one o'clock, I do have another. So Tommy records his, none of his is live. And then he publishes them about an hour later. The lady that does the, I always get this wrong, Miss Kokenda.

2:13:00 We're going to be... Promethean Action. Yeah, Promethean Action. You're going on Promethean Action with Susan Kokega? Her and I are going on Tommy's podcast together. That's awesome. I got to watch that one. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, so that one will be recorded at 1 o'clock on Wednesday, so it'll probably be out around 2 o'clock. And then, of course, we have our normal Wednesday, and then Alpha Warrior at 9.

2:13:29 And then on Thursday, if I do one at all, it will be earlier, like probably around two. I may just cancel it because this is our annual Strawberry Festival. It starts on Thursday. Those of you who've been with me for years understand that the Strawberry Festival is like the highlight of the entire year. It's a 10-day festival.

2:14:00 several times during the festival. And when I do, that's like the priority. However, this year, they didn't have quite as good a lineup. So we're not going as often as I normally go. But Alabama is playing at seven o'clock on Thursday night. So we will not be doing our normal show on Thursday. If I make other arrangements, I'll...

2:14:29 But right now we're just going to cancel the Thursday show. And then on Friday, if Warhamster does not cancel on me again, we're going to have the noon show with Warhamster. And I have a two o'clock with Nino. Is his last name Rodriguez? I think it is.

2:15:00 Nina Rodriguez. Yeah. And then that's it for now. So that's a lot. Are you going to breathe? But the word is getting out. So I was joking with my, I'm trying to remember what the conversation was.

2:15:29 I told my husband because Tommy has invited me on with all of these really cool people that I feel like I ought to be paying him a booking agent. And my husband looks at me and he goes, isn't he the one making the money? Isn't it his podcast? I'm like, oh yeah, that's right. But anyway, so thank you guys for being here and helping me with all of this material.

2:15:59 Because obviously the word's getting out. And I'm just tickled to death that people are finally, you hear people actually say Operation Gladio now. And that didn't happen three years ago. I've never heard anybody say the words. But it's definitely out there now. So we've definitely been able to move the needle a little bit.

2:16:28 Love it when a plan comes together. Just throwing that out there. Yes, absolutely. All right, guys, I'm starving. Thanks for being here. Take care, and I will see you later.

Entities here

United States27 Soviet Union25 Frank Wisner25 CIA25 United Kingdom25 Albania21 Mexico21 Inter-Services Intelligence20 Baltic states17 Lithuania14 Office of Strategic Services12 West Germany12 Harry S. Truman11 Office of Policy Coordination10 Baltic Partisan Struggle9 E. Michael Burke9 Allen Dulles9 World War II8 U.S. State Department8 Enver Hoxha8 Harry Lambton Carr8 Reinhard Gehlen7 Catholic Church7 Franklin A. Lindsay7 Walter Bedell Smith6 Malta6 Rome6 Gehlen Organization6 Italy5 William Harding Jackson5 Marshall Plan5 Sweden5 Greece5 Kim Philby5 National Security Council5 Yugoslavia5 Jean Kirkpatrick4 Estonia4 Robert Joyce4 Operation Gladio4

Claims made here

Frank Wisner headed Office of Policy Coordination book_quoted ▶ 4:31

“Nonetheless, an attempt would be made. Wisner's move into paramilitary action was preceded by the British Secret Intelligence Service, SIS, whose controller, North, became the first to make contact an…”

Soviet Union covered_up Baltic Partisan Struggle book_quoted ▶ 6:33

“attacks, false flags, in which entire British security units pretended to be partisan vans. The largest recorded Lithuanian attack on a Russian post occurred in February 1948, but their strength in nu…”

Inter-Services Intelligence recruited Walter Zelenskas book_quoted ▶ 9:02

“any of them back to the Russians. The British controller Northern Area, Harry Lambton Carr, masterminded this operation. Partisans who at first relied on leftover German and captured Russian weapons b…”

Harry Lambton Carr headed Inter-Services Intelligence book_quoted ▶ 9:02

Inter-Services Intelligence recruited Stasys Zymantas book_quoted ▶ 9:02

Inter-Services Intelligence recruited Hans Helmut Kloss book_quoted ▶ 12:03

“And the British permitted these unarmed ships to wear Royal Navy ensign. The SIS then enlisted a former German naval officer, Hans Helmut Kloss, who had led a torpedo boat flotilla in the Baltics. In …”

Frank Wisner funded Office of Policy Coordination book_quoted ▶ 13:09

“Here's where the CIA could be helpful. You know, our money. In particular, Frank Wisner. He had money to burn because of the Marshall Plan. Not only was Wisner liberally funded by three different agen…”

Franklin A. Lindsay proposed Frank Wisner book_quoted ▶ 16:07

“Lindsay was another OSS veteran and one of the real paramilitary, well-experienced agents. During the war, he had worked in what was then Yugoslavia, arranging secret arms shipments. It was Lindsay, t…”

Frank Wisner funded Gehlen Organization book_quoted ▶ 17:08

“OSS, let me be here to set up the Marshall Plan, then I'm going to go implement it and ensure that Dulles' stay-behind units are fully funded. Not shocked. Oh, and by the way, he works on the Congress…”

Gordon Stewart member_of CIA book_quoted ▶ 18:39

“So the Nazis are picking out their own people. The Germans had fewer language difficulties with the Baltic nations. So they also did much of the basic training and housekeeping at the bases. They have…”

Office of Policy Coordination carried_out_attack Lithuania book_quoted ▶ 19:09

“October 3, 1949. A team was parachuted into Lithuania by Czech air crew working for OPC, Frank Wisner. Communications remained poor. The agent's messages garbled. The Baltics warned that the operation…”

Harry Rozeski member_of CIA book_quoted ▶ 19:32

“resisted that view. In particular, one of the agents had come twice out of Russia and ultimately denied area with no difficulty. Harry Carr interpreted the suspicions as expressions of politics. At th…”

Inter-Services Intelligence carried_out_attack Lithuania book_quoted ▶ 21:04

“One early recruit to the CIA effort was Jonas Lucas, who parachuted back into Lithuania, but soon died at the side of the Forrest Brotherhood. That's the name of the indigenous fighters there. The SIS…”

CIA carried_out_attack Lithuania book_quoted ▶ 21:30

“Between 49 and 51, the CIA reportedly parachuted several more agents, but the results were poor. Accounts asserted that almost half of the operatives survived, but known cases mostly encountered troub…”

Lou Shearer member_of CIA book_quoted ▶ 21:57

“They had been housed in Stockholm and their mission left from Munich. The Scandinavian branch of Wisner's unit ran the Stockholm end. Branch Chief Lou Shearer insisted that no leaks had occurred on hi…”

Harry Rozeski member_of Office of Policy Coordination book_quoted ▶ 22:29

“where they met with Harry Carr and other senior SIS officers concerned about these operations. Harry Rositsky led the group for the CIA, and one of the more suspicious Baltic officers accompanied the …”

Jerry Miller member_of CIA book_quoted ▶ 22:29

CIA carried_out_attack Latvia book_quoted ▶ 23:32

“Using precaution, Gerhard Meyer, who was a branch chief for the Baltic under Rosesky, came away convinced, I feel I've spent three days chewing cotton when he was done with the meetings. One of the ea…”

Gerhard Meyer member_of CIA book_quoted ▶ 23:32

Soviet Union recruited Avritis Galitis book_quoted ▶ 24:34

“The Soviets fooled Berkus, convinced Galdens to remain in Lithuania where they executed him, and inserted their own agent, Avritis Galitis, as the purported Forest Brotherhood chief. Galitis went comp…”

Sandy McKiblin member_of Inter-Services Intelligence book_quoted ▶ 24:34

Gehlen Organization supplied_arms_to Estonia book_quoted ▶ 25:32

“When all of the necessary people that you would want to reach were already dead, its appealing visions of democracy were at odds with the facts evident to the remaining partisans that British and Amer…”

William Colby recruited Baltic states book_quoted ▶ 28:01

“William Colby. There you go. I can always get those two confused, Casey and Colby. I should remember Colby Cheese. Maybe that's how I'll remember it. He had worked in Scandinavia for the OSS and he we…”

CIA targeted_for_regime_change Albania book_quoted ▶ 29:41

“By 1949, both of them hostile to Stalin. So Albania's quote-unquote Iron Curtain was much more vulnerable. There were also bases available on the island of Malta and in Italy, just a short jump away. …”

Inter-Services Intelligence targeted_for_regime_change Enver Hoxha book_quoted ▶ 30:13

“So they're thinking that's going to be a strategic advantage. CIA had intelligence that Soviet sailors and advisors were setting up a naval base there. The notion of creating an internal opposition to…”

Inter-Services Intelligence funded Operation Valuable book_quoted ▶ 30:42

“These were joint operations. A small band of commandos were to be infiltrated to set up local guerrilla groups, which could be coordinated and supported from the outside. The plan was called Operation…”

CIA funded Operation Valuable book_quoted ▶ 30:42

Special Operations Executive supplied_arms_to Enver Hoxha book_quoted ▶ 31:14

“with incidents two years earlier in which the British warship was fired upon. Later, a pair of destroyers were mined and sunk in the Corfu Channel along the Albanian coast. Although the British Specia…”

Ernest Bevin ordered_assassination_of Enver Hoxha book_quoted ▶ 31:41

“In February, British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin agreed to the plan to detach Albania from the Soviet bloc. The Hoxha government, meanwhile, further encouraged British hostility by refusing to acce…”

William Hayter member_of Inter-Services Intelligence book_quoted ▶ 32:10

“In March, William Hayter, a senior British intelligence officer, led a delegation of SIS and foreign office officials to Washington to ask for support for Operation Valuable and to present a broad ran…”

James McGarger member_of Office of Policy Coordination book_quoted ▶ 33:06

“were the SIS liaison man and their Balkan expert at the embassy. Americans included Robert Joyce, representing the State Department. What? The State Department's doing covert operations? I'm shocked. …”

Robert Lowe member_of Office of Policy Coordination book_quoted ▶ 33:38

“A former diplomat running a covert operation? Wow. He found the task so rewarding that he moved to the CIA. You know, almost like they change seats. Often. The first OPC field officer assigned would b…”

Inter-Services Intelligence recruited David Smiley documented ▶ 35:51

“Wisner told an SIS officer, quote, whenever we want to subvert any place, we find the British owns an island within easy reach, unquote. How convenient. And when they want to money launder, they do it…”

David Smiley trained Albania documented ▶ 37:18

“Smiley supervised the training. Feelers were put out in other directions as well. Yugoslavia had halted its aid to Greek guerrillas and broken with Stalin in 1948. They might participate.…”

David Smiley trained Hemat Majani documented ▶ 37:18

“Smiley supervised the training. Feelers were put out in other directions as well. Yugoslavia had halted its aid to Greek guerrillas and broken with Stalin in 1948. They might participate.…”

E. Michael Burke member_of Office of Strategic Services documented ▶ 38:40

“meeting place for spies. So two men come up from Washington to talk with Burke. They had gotten his name from a friend at the OSS, most likely Frank Lindsey. E. Michael Burke had served in the Navy an…”

E. Michael Burke worked_with Franklin A. Lindsay documented ▶ 39:15

“unfortunately, and had been sent to Italy with a team in connection with the surrender of the Axis nation. Toward the end of the war, Burke had gone into Yugoslavia and worked with Lindsay with partis…”

John Ringling North member_of Ringling Family documented ▶ 39:15

John Ringling North worked_for Warner Brothers documented ▶ 39:46

“He parlayed them into a post-war job as a technical advisor to Warner Brothers. Oh my gosh, another spy in Hollywood. I'm shocked. He worked personally on a film released in 1948 as a tribute to the O…”

CIA recruited E. Michael Burke documented ▶ 40:18

“He's a spy. At the luncheon, he had to suppress his excitement and let his CIA interlopers talk him into coming back to the agency like he ever left. The CIA men described the project in words that co…”

Inter-Services Intelligence recruited Julian Amery documented ▶ 40:54

“He'd provide his own cover. Michael Burke moved to Rome and pretended to open a new film company. How convenient. In Rome, Burke began seeing Albanian exiles of different political persuasions with U.…”

E. Michael Burke funded Bali Komsa documented ▶ 40:54

Bali Komsa collaborated_with West Germany documented ▶ 41:54

“or National Front, centered in Rome and Athens. They had collaborated with the Germans and Italians in the war. Oh, great, more Nazis. One leader had been the interior minister under the Germans, dire…”

Julian Amery recruited Bali Komsa documented ▶ 42:25

“At meetings in Rome in June and July of 49, Birkin Amory nonetheless brought Bali into the operation. You know, because we love our Nazis. The Western spies flew to Cairo and called on exiled King Zog…”

King Zog I opposed_by Bali Komsa documented ▶ 42:49

“Zog had seized power in 1924 coup and several years later made himself a king. Zog now had his own political movement led by Firtat Abbas. When Zog learned the West had already approached Bali, which …”

Frank Wisner funded National Committee for a Free Europe documented ▶ 43:50

“where the CIA psychological warfare chief, Joe Bryan, helped the Albanians prepare press releases. The Albanians visited the U.S. more openly, sponsored by Frank Wisner's funded Committee for a Free E…”

CIA assisted Hungarian National Committee documented ▶ 44:20

“Many of the same people had previously been denied entry, but the CIA, like they always do, stepped right in and made it all happen. Bob Joyce reported to the State Department, quote, my friends state…”

Inter-Services Intelligence carried_out_attack Albania documented ▶ 45:22

“died suddenly of a heart attack at a hotel. Robert Lowe, called in by the police to identify the dead Albanian, had to explain his connections. Who's this guy? By coincidence, the same night the Briti…”

Kim Philby spied_on CIA documented ▶ 46:24

“that the SIS had Kim Philby and he was telling the Soviets everything that was going on. The immediate problem for the secret warriors was to replace Fersheri as head of the Albanian political organiz…”

Kim Philby spied_on Project FF documented ▶ 46:24

Hassan Dosti collaborated_with Italy documented ▶ 46:57

“Offie pushed strongly for the nationalist Hassan Dosti, who had collaborated with the Italian fascists during the war. So they're fascists, not Nazis. Dosti proved to lack the political support to exe…”

Carmel Offey supported Hassan Dosti documented ▶ 46:57

Ernest Bevin met_with Dean Acheson documented ▶ 47:29

“Project Fiend at the highest levels. Ernest Bevin visited Washington in September 1949. A CIA report concluded that a purely internal Albanian uprising at this time is not indicated, and if undertaken…”

Dean Acheson agreed_to_overthrow Enver Hoxha documented ▶ 49:28

“In these countries. In his conversation, Bevan asked whether the U.S. basically agreed with the overthrow of the hopes of government. Atkinson assured him they did. The British foreign secretary also …”

CIA formed Company 400 documented ▶ 51:29

“It continued for years, consuming increasing resources. In 1950, the CIA began mounting its own pixie expeditions, forming a unit in Germany called Company 400. An initiative began by Karmel Afi. The …”

CIA hired Roman Rukowski documented ▶ 51:58

“in Royal Air Force Partisan Support Units, led by Polish Colonel Roman Rukowski, were hired to fly transport aircraft. During the summer, Wisner's group used the planes to drop leaflets and propaganda…”

Frank Wisner ordered Hemat Majani documented ▶ 53:23

“With Philby already under investigation, three groups were parachuted in by Wisner. One was obliterated on landing. One was surrounded in a house and burned alive. While two pixies of the last group o…”

Enver Hoxha ambushed Hemat Majani documented ▶ 54:19

“was his last. The Tiger and his party was ambushed. Majani's last mission had actually been set up by the Hoxha-owned security men with Soviet advice. After capturing a radio and two officers of Zog's…”

Enver Hoxha held_trial_for Hemat Majani documented ▶ 54:51

“The same kind of deceptions the Soviets had used in the Baltics. But these guys don't learn any lessons. They had been frustrated by boat landing failures. The Americans carried on and dropped Manjani…”

E. Michael Burke headed CIA documented ▶ 55:22

“We'll get it right next time because he's not the one dying. Widespread disillusionment followed the Albanian experience. Not least among them were the former pixies. Several of them complained, we we…”

E. Michael Burke transferred_to West Germany documented ▶ 56:19

“and then became a soldier of fortune, doing the same shit, just getting paid more for it. The CIA E. Howard Hunt welcomed orders for transfer to the Western Hemisphere Division. Michael Burke, promote…”

E. Michael Burke worked_with Reinhard Gehlen host_asserted ▶ 56:19

John Richardson liquidated Project FF documented ▶ 56:47

“It fell to the Southeast Europe Division Chief John Richardson to liquidate Project Fiend, a wartime veteran of the Counterintelligence Corps of the U.S. Army in Italy. Richardson had been renowned fo…”

James Forrestal wanted_supervision_by National Security Council documented ▶ 59:13

“was out in the field playing games. As Admiral Hill and Cotter struggled to establish the CIA, officials at the NSC wrestled with how to control it. Secretary of Defense James Forrestal wanted supervi…”

Sidney Sowers refused_job National Security Council documented ▶ 59:13

National Security Council ordered U.S. State Department documented ▶ 1:01:12

“the covert action. Truman's NSC ordered State and Pentagon to collaborate on a paper that would turn the Dulles-Jackson-Corea report into a set of recommendations, completed and adopted by the NSC tha…”

National Security Council ordered Pentagon documented ▶ 1:01:12

Roscoe Hillenkoetter resigned CIA documented ▶ 1:02:39

“While the cost of NSC-68 was still being calculated in June of 50, North Korea, this is the old version of it, North Korea invaded South Korea. We know the real story. Within days of the attack, Admir…”

Harry S. Truman appointed Walter Bedell Smith documented ▶ 1:03:41

“Truman already had Hill and Cotter's successor lined up. He was going to ask Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith. The 54-year-old officer had been a wartime chief to Dwight D. Eisenhower. From 46 t…”

Walter Bedell Smith appointed William Harding Jackson documented ▶ 1:04:16

“Walter Bedell Smith had the clout to make things happen and sufficient prestige among the U.S. military to knock down the opposition to working with the CIA. The military intelligence unit had resiste…”

Walter Bedell Smith persuaded National Security Council documented ▶ 1:05:18

“As DCI, the general said, he had all the authority necessary to direct the OPC. The arrangements made in 48 had been overtaken by events and were no longer valid. As for Wisner's problem with the wart…”

Robert Joyce represented U.S. State Department documented ▶ 1:05:47

“where it should be noted he had good friends. Bob Joyce represented state, while General John Magruder, once head of the pre-CIA Strategic Services Unit, stood in for the Secretary of Defense. Admiral…”

Leslie Stevens member_of Joint Chiefs of Staff documented ▶ 1:05:47

Allen Dulles recruited Frank Wisner host_asserted ▶ 1:07:50

“had Alan Dulles brought in who was hired to be a consultant. The brains at CIA came up with the idea of bringing better cooperation between Wisner and the OSO office by co-locating them. That didn't w…”

Jean Kirkpatrick member_of Office of Policy Coordination host_asserted ▶ 1:08:17

“I'll just give you some of the names. William Jackson was involved, Lyman Kirkpatrick, Willard Wyman, Colonel Kilburn Johnson, and Allen Dulles. Lyman Kirkpatrick also wanted the DO staff kept to a mi…”

Office of Policy Coordination funded Office of Strategic Services host_asserted ▶ 1:09:19

“At the time in 1951, would you be surprised to learn that half of Frank Wisner's people were in the Far East Division, like Taiwan, Burma, Vietnam area? What were we doing in the 1950s in that area? O…”

Lucian K. Truscott headed CIA host_asserted ▶ 1:09:51

“As an experiment, the small Latin American branches of both OPC and OSO joined together, branch by branch, becoming the Eastern Hemisphere Division. That would be the first. General Lucian Trescott, C…”

Office of Policy Coordination member_of CIA host_asserted ▶ 1:09:51

CIA trafficked Thailand host_asserted ▶ 1:12:50

“this function away from Wisner. Lyman Kirkpatrick in Thailand to reconcile OSO and OPC station chiefs who had a little war between themselves. Thailand, like where we spent $35 million to own the port…”

Richard Helms succeeded Jean Kirkpatrick host_asserted ▶ 1:13:21

“and continue the trip, alerting others to the orders. Kirkpatrick would become the chief of operations of the D.O. shop, which meant functioning as a deputy to Wisner. But Kirkpatrick never assumed th…”

Knights of Malta covered_up USS Liberty incident host_asserted ▶ 1:14:29

“Lots of stuff. Yeah, we've covered the, you know, obviously the origins of the Knights of Malta is from Malta. And that's where they took the survivors of the USS Liberty. That's where they hauled the…”

Israel supplied_arms_to Colombia host_asserted ▶ 1:16:51

“Did they supply weapons that ended up in the cartel? Absolutely. We've already talked about the Galil weapons in Colombia and throughout Latin America. Well-known fact. But even Grok got it right when…”

Catholic Church laundered_money_for Mexico host_asserted ▶ 1:24:10

“because we know that the church has laundered money for the cartels or to drug operations in general. So it is a very interesting piece of the puzzle. We have not seen in Mexico the same terror.…”

CIA trained Ukraine speculative ▶ 1:41:22

“talked about these people from the cartel being trained in Ukraine. Now, whether or not that's true, I would probably say there's a high probability of it, but I don't know that there's any evidence t…”

SEAL teams trained Mexico host_asserted ▶ 1:43:41

“I don't know. I don't know if that's a real thing or not. But it just seems like there's a lot of the Latin American press releases that are going off similar to that. So, yeah, to your point, he does…”

Weather Underground front_for Operation Gladio host_asserted ▶ 2:11:04

“That was something. Cool. Just so you know, Colonel, Courtney says it gave her the impression of the weather underground and what was going on. And from your reading, I can see it. Yeah. Yeah. The wea…”